An Open Letter from Graham Larkin to David Horowitz

February 1, 2005

Dear Mr. Horowitz,

Thank you for your response to my latest letter concerning the Academic Bill of Rights. While I have been grateful all along for your attention to my criticisms, this time my thanks are more heartfelt than ever, as you have done me the courtesy of publishing my text before responding to it. I'm confident that we're both going to be a little less shrill and self-indulgent as a result of your honorable citation method.

I notice a dramatic improvement in the general tenor of your latest response. On the whole, it is more in line with the thoughtful and deeply human David Horowitz of Radical Son. This is the Horowitz whose absence I regretted when I saw you speaking about the war at the Hoover Institution last spring.

I think it's fair to say that our discussion about the disputability of truth claims demonstrates that any absolute claim about the nature of truth -- yours or mine -- is infinitely contestable, because it's so hard to settle on the terms. I might have done better to stay away from any absolute claims in my own argument, and to show instead how the ABOR's blanket pronouncements about truth are subject to the inherent circularity of all claims to radical relativism.

For instance, if the statement that "there is no humanly accessible truth that is not in principle open to challenge" is true and humanly accessible, then it must follow that this very claim is disputable. Ergo, it cannot be true. (And so on. It's a perfect paradox.) If, on the other hand, the statement is not both humanly accessible and true, then it shouldn't be passed it into law. By contrast, a law like the First Amendment is entirely satisfactory, because it leaves people free to openly assert to either the settledness or the unsettledness of a particular truth-claim (or of truth in general, if one believes in such a thing).

Finally, here are my brief responses to four passages in the letter you posted today

"The sentence in this fund-raising solicitation is said to outweigh the testimony of the Academic Bill of Rights itself."

This certainly wasn't said by me. I don't weigh the relative importance of these two issues, either in the letter in question or anywhere else.

"The fact is that I run an organization with 17 employees situated in half a dozen states, manage two website and have overseen the two-year development of a third, make 50 speeches or appearances a year out of state, do 150 hours of radio and TV interviews, write approximately 100,000 words a year, edit several hundred thousand, put on a dozen or more events involving hundreds of individuals in two American cities and one abroad, authorize a dozen or more solicitation letters like the one in question, and much else besides."

I never denied that you're a busy man. But I do think that if you get to the point where you don't have time to read all your own writings, then you are biting off more than you can chew. And when you deny responsibility for things you have allowed to bear your signature, then you are opening yourself up to a valid ethical critique.

"[B]ecause the university is an educational not a political institution [student programs] should be fair and balanced. Does Larkin think they shouldn't be?"

The answer is implicit in my initial ABOR critique . There I write that

Anyone who wants to make professors stick to the "appropriate knowledge" of their respective fields had better lay down some explicit guidelines detailing exactly (1) who's doing the fostering, (2) what invests them with the special knowledge to have this authority, (3) where their standards of appropriateness are coming from, and (4) how these standards will be implemented.

I would say exactly the same thing about anyone who wants to institute "fair and balanced" student programming. If you can come up with a clear recipe for determining ideological fairness and balance in student programming or any other matter, then come back and I will dispute your recipe. However nice being "fair and balanced" may seem in the abstract, I don't think that the ideological stock-taking necessary for its enforcement can ever be accomplished in an objective way.

"[E]ven though this is his third stab at critique of the Academic Bill of Rights, [Larkin] still has not identified a single tenet of the actual Bill to which he objects."

This is untrue. For instance the link in the passage just quoted, published in September, refers the reader directly to an objectionable ABOR tenet, and indicates its deficiencies. At one point in my most recent letter -- the one to which you are here responding -- I quote three objectionable tenets in the space of just two sentences, and go on to explain my objections.

Thank you for your attention. I look forward to your Stanford lecture this evening, and to any future exchanges.

Sincerely,

Graham Larkin
Stanford University, Department of Art & Art History
CA-AAUP VP for Private Colleges and Universities

Back to Larkin-Horowitz Exchange